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Development Of A Novel Screening Strategy Designed To Discover A New Class Of Hiv Drugs, Nancy Cheng, Sook-Kyung Lee, P. Donover, Mel Reichman, Celia Schiffer, Emily Hull-Ryde, Ronald Swanstrom, William Janzen Jan 2015

Development Of A Novel Screening Strategy Designed To Discover A New Class Of Hiv Drugs, Nancy Cheng, Sook-Kyung Lee, P. Donover, Mel Reichman, Celia Schiffer, Emily Hull-Ryde, Ronald Swanstrom, William Janzen

Celia A. Schiffer

Current antiretroviral treatments target multiple pathways important for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) multiplication, including viral entry, synthesis and integration of the DNA provirus, and the processing of viral polyprotein precursors. However, HIV is becoming increasingly resistant to these "combination therapies." Recent findings show that inhibition of HIV Gag protein cleavage into its two structural proteins, matrix (MA) and capsid (CA), has a devastating effect on viral production, revealing a potential new target class for HIV treatment. Unlike the widely used HIV protease inhibitors, this new class of inhibitor would target the substrate, not the protease enzyme itself. This approach offers …


Interview With Celia Schiffer, Celia Schiffer Jan 2015

Interview With Celia Schiffer, Celia Schiffer

Celia A. Schiffer

Celia Schiffer, a Professor in Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology; a former Director of UMass Center for AIDS Research; and a Founder and Co-Director for the Institute for Drug Resistance (University of Massachusetts Medical School, MA, USA). Schiffer has an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Chicago, with a PhD in biophysics from University of California, San Francisco (CA, USA). She was a postdoctoral associate first at the ETH in Zurich and then at Genentech in San Francisco. Schiffer has published more than 100 peer reviewed journal articles. Her laboratory primarily uses structural biology, biophysical and chemistry techniques to …


Prototypical Recombinant Multi-Protease Inhibitor Resistant Infectious Molecular Clones Of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type-1, Vici Varghese, Yumi Mitsuya, W. Jeffrey Fessel, Tommy F. Liu, George Melikian, David Katzenstein, Celia Schiffer, Susan Holmes, Robert Shafer Jan 2015

Prototypical Recombinant Multi-Protease Inhibitor Resistant Infectious Molecular Clones Of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type-1, Vici Varghese, Yumi Mitsuya, W. Jeffrey Fessel, Tommy F. Liu, George Melikian, David Katzenstein, Celia Schiffer, Susan Holmes, Robert Shafer

Celia A. Schiffer

The many genetic manifestations of HIV-1 protease inhibitor (PI) resistance present challenges to research into the mechanisms of PI-resistance and the assessment of new PIs. To address these challenges, we created a panel of recombinant multi-PI resistant infectious molecular clones designed to represent the spectrum of clinically relevant multi-PI resistant viruses. To assess the representativeness of this panel, we examined the sequences of the panel's viruses in the context of a correlation network of PI-resistance amino acid substitutions in sequences from more than 10,000 patients. The panel of recombinant infectious molecular clones comprised 29 of 41 study-defined PI-resistance amino acid …


Cooperative Effects Of Drug-Resistance Mutations In The Flap Region Of Hiv-1 Protease, Jennifer Foulkes-Murzycki, Christina Rosi, Nese Yilmaz, Robert Shafer, Celia Schiffer Jul 2013

Cooperative Effects Of Drug-Resistance Mutations In The Flap Region Of Hiv-1 Protease, Jennifer Foulkes-Murzycki, Christina Rosi, Nese Yilmaz, Robert Shafer, Celia Schiffer

Celia A. Schiffer

Understanding the interdependence of multiple mutations in conferring drug resistance is crucial to the development of novel and robust inhibitors. As HIV-1 protease continues to adapt and evade inhibitors while still maintaining the ability to specifically recognize and efficiently cleave its substrates, the problem of drug resistance has become more complicated. Under the selective pressure of therapy, correlated mutations accumulate throughout the enzyme to compromise inhibitor binding, but characterizing their energetic interdependency is not straightforward. A particular drug resistant variant (L10I/G48V/I54V/V82A) displays extreme entropy-enthalpy compensation relative to wild-type enzyme but a similar variant (L10I/G48V/I54A/V82A) does not. Individual mutations of sites …


Competition Between Ski And Creb-Binding Protein For Binding To Smad Proteins In Transforming Growth Factor-Beta Signaling, Weijun Chen, Suvana Lam, Hema Srinath, Celia Schiffer, William Royer, Kai Lin Nov 2011

Competition Between Ski And Creb-Binding Protein For Binding To Smad Proteins In Transforming Growth Factor-Beta Signaling, Weijun Chen, Suvana Lam, Hema Srinath, Celia Schiffer, William Royer, Kai Lin

Celia A. Schiffer

The family of Smad proteins mediates transforming growth factor-beta (TGF-beta) signaling in cell growth and differentiation. Smads repress or activate TGF-beta signaling by interacting with corepressors (e.g. Ski) or coactivators (e.g. CREB-binding protein (CBP)), respectively. Specifically, Ski has been shown to interfere with the interaction between Smad3 and CBP. However, it is unclear whether Ski competes with CBP for binding to Smads and whether they can interact with Smad3 at the same binding surface on Smad3. We investigated the interactions among purified constructs of Smad, Ski, and CBP in vitro by size-exclusion chromatography, isothermal titration calorimetry, and mutational studies. Here, …


Mass Spectrometry Analysis Of Hiv-1 Vif Reveals An Increase In Ordered Structure Upon Oligomerization In Regions Necessary For Viral Infectivity, Jared Auclair, Karin Green, Shivender Shandilya, James Evans, Mohan Somasundaran, Celia Schiffer Nov 2011

Mass Spectrometry Analysis Of Hiv-1 Vif Reveals An Increase In Ordered Structure Upon Oligomerization In Regions Necessary For Viral Infectivity, Jared Auclair, Karin Green, Shivender Shandilya, James Evans, Mohan Somasundaran, Celia Schiffer

Celia A. Schiffer

HIV-1 Vif, an accessory protein in the viral genome, performs an important role in viral pathogenesis by facilitating the degradation of APOBEC3G, an endogenous cellular inhibitor of HIV-1 replication. In this study, intrinsically disordered regions are predicted in HIV-1 Vif using sequence-based algorithms. Intrinsic disorder may explain why traditional structure determination of HIV-1 Vif has been elusive, making structure-based drug design impossible. To characterize HIV-1 Vif's structural topology and to map the domains involved in oligomerization we used chemical cross-linking, proteolysis, and mass spectrometry. Cross-linking showed evidence of monomer, dimer, and trimer species via denaturing gel analysis and an additional …


Exploring The Role Of The Solvent In The Denaturation Of A Protein: A Molecular Dynamics Study Of The Dna Binding Domain Of The 434 Repressor, Celia Schiffer, Volker Dötsch, Kurt Wuthrich, Wilfred Van Gunsteren Nov 2011

Exploring The Role Of The Solvent In The Denaturation Of A Protein: A Molecular Dynamics Study Of The Dna Binding Domain Of The 434 Repressor, Celia Schiffer, Volker Dötsch, Kurt Wuthrich, Wilfred Van Gunsteren

Celia A. Schiffer

Molecular dynamics simulations of the DNA binding domain of 434 repressor are presented which aim at unraveling the role of solvent in protein denaturation. Four altered solvent models, each mimicking various possible aspects of the addition of a denaturant to the aqueous solvent, were used in the simulations to analyze their effects on the stability of the protein. The solvent was altered by selectively changing the Coulombic interaction between water and protein atoms and between different water molecules. The use of a modified solvent model has the advantage of mimicking the presence of denaturant without having denaturant molecules present in …


Structural Analysis Of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Crf01_Ae Protease In Complex With The Substrate P1-P6., Rajintha Bandaranayake, Moses Prabu-Jeyabalan, Junko Kakizawa, Wataru Sugiura, Celia Schiffer Nov 2011

Structural Analysis Of Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Crf01_Ae Protease In Complex With The Substrate P1-P6., Rajintha Bandaranayake, Moses Prabu-Jeyabalan, Junko Kakizawa, Wataru Sugiura, Celia Schiffer

Celia A. Schiffer

The effect of amino acid variability between human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) clades on structure and the emergence of resistance mutations in HIV-1 protease has become an area of significant interest in recent years. We determined the first crystal structure of the HIV-1 CRF01_AE protease in complex with the p1-p6 substrate to a resolution of 2.8 A. Hydrogen bonding between the flap hinge and the protease core regions shows significant structural rearrangements in CRF01_AE protease compared to the clade B protease structure.